Saturday, August 28, 2010

Note: This extension is vulnerable to changes YouTube may make to their web site or their player. It is recommended to use the YouTube Bulk Player which uses YouTube's official API and is more reliable.

This extension lets you play all the YouTube video links on a page by just several clicks.

Many long videos are split into small pieces and uploaded to YouTube. This help shows you how to "catenate" them with the YouTube Play All extension.

For example, if we want to watch some videos of Beijing Olympics 2008, we can go to www.youtube.com and input Beijing Olympics into the search box. We would get so many results. To narrow it down, we input the owner's name as well -- Beijing Olympics by beautyorient. Now we get 11 videos as the search result.

Right click on the result page and the context menu pops up. The YouTube Play All menu item is at the bottom. Clicking on it brings up the Select Video dialog.

Alternatively, you can open the dialog through Tools menu of the menu bar.

We can see there are more videos listed in the scroll box. We just ignore those we don't care and select the wanted videos by click on the little checkbox at the beginning of the record of the video.

You may also notice that the videos are sorted by the Description column. But they may not be in the order we want. We can click to highlight one row (or multiple rows by Shift-click on the last row) and use the Up/Down buttons on the right side to move the video up or down.

After selecting all the videos we want to play and move them into the right order, we can press the OK button to play them all.

A new tab will be opened to play the selected videos one by one. There are some controlling buttons at the bottom left corner of the browser. You can use them to play the first video, go to the previous video, go to the next video, or play the last video. If you are watching the first video, the previous button is grayed out. If you are watching the last video, the next button is grayed out. In the middle of the bottom of the browser, is the description of the video you are watching.

We can now Full-Screen, sit back and enjoy the whole video.

New features added in version 1.2

In version 1.2, some enhancements are added:
The YouTube videos detected are split into 3 groups:

text links

{img} -- links with thumbnails.

{embed} -- embedded videos on the page.

These videos may be duplicated with the other group, so you can usually choose to show one group to select your videos in the Select Video dialog. Certainly you can choose to show all videos.

You can enable the Suggest High Definition to suggest the videos to be played in HD mode. We use "suggest" here because whether a video will be actually played in HD mode is determined by YouTube.

The Select Video dialog now has a Maximize button on the title bar. It is more convenient if there are so many videos on a page.